A typical municipality has a vast infrastructure which includes a number of facilities, services, and resources. This infrastructure must be maintained on a 24/7 basis in order to provide competent, effective city-wide services. Typical municipal services include public utilities management, water management, municipal accounting and information systems, traffic control, municipal parking control, video surveillance, transportation, weather-related services, and emergency services. Most municipalities have separate departments and agencies that are each responsible for a particular aspect of the infrastructure. Not surprisingly, very often each department or agency implements separate policies, communications protocol, information systems and data standards. It is very common that the communication and information systems of each department are not compatible with each other or are simply not connected to one another. While industry standards exist for application layer protocol, database schema and data objects, each department and each device within each department may have its own proprietary application layer that would require that a management device be customized to understand each proprietary protocol. This situation precludes master management of all departments and devices. The potential advantages of shared information among municipal operations and functions are not achieved.
In addition to system incompatibility issues, municipalities typically rely on manpower in areas where technology and/or automation could perform the job at hand. Full time employees are used to perform daily inspection and assessment of city facilities and resources. Not only are valuable, costly resources being utilized, it is time-consuming and results are difficult to communicate to those who are ultimately concerned. Municipalities are in need of a mechanism by which to organize and disseminate the flow of mission critical information throughout the infrastructure.